52
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23, 2018
the dip of paddles in the current and
the tuneful descending song of the
canyon wren.
The first night's camp, called Puerto
Rico, was Mile , river right, a broad
floodplain of sand, stones, and grass.
Puerto Rico was in Mexico. (After
September th, Americans were not
supposed to pull ashore, much less
spend the night, on the Mexican side,
but in recent years the authorities have
relaxed a bit.) We set up a bucket bri-
gade to o oad the accoutrements of
our portable hotel: folding tables and
chairs, four-burner range, Dutch oven,
propane tanks, coolers, water jugs, doz-
ens of du el-size dry bags, tents, and
camping mattresses known as paco
pads. You can carry a lot more in a
boat than in a backpack. The laws of
flotation allow for comfort and en-
courage excess. As the guides worked,
the guests scattered to claim sites to
pitch their tents. Dry bags spilled out
domestic consolations: clean clothes,
toiletries, pillows, headlamps. You could
hear some light argument among
spouses and siblings amid the clickety-
clack of tent poles. LeRoy shooed away
some grazing cattle and used a rake to
remove cow dung from the prime tent
spots. Udall took over for a while. Roo-
sevelt said, "Someone has to get a pic-
ture of the Senator shovelling shit."
Roosevelt, a seventy-five-year-old
investment banker, who served in
Vietnam with the Navy s, was
dressed like Udall, but with a Stet-
son hat and a red bandanna around
his neck. He had a radio-friendly
baritone and a solicitous air. A life-
long conservationist and Republi-
can, by inheritance and practice, he
is among those in his party who are
dismayed by Trump yet are still striv-
ing, against diminishing odds, to find
some workable common ground. He's
the kind of environmentalist who can
acknowledge and regret the occasion-
ally invasive and inflexible nature of
a federally enforced regimen. None-
theless, the rollbacks and predations
of this Administration appall him.
In , Roosevelt's great-grandfa-
ther, as President, established the Na-
tional Wildlife Refuge system, with
the designation of Pelican Island, in
Florida---the first instance of the fed-
eral government putting aside land
for wildlife. As it happens, one of the
first sections of the border wall was
scheduled to be built on a national
wildlife refuge in the lower Rio
Grande, the Santa Ana, one of the re-
gion's most crucial habitats for migra-
tory birds. Last year, contractors for
the Department of Homeland Secu-
rity arrived there to drill test holes.
Just upriver last summer, at the Na-
tional Butterfly Center, a privately
owned refuge, a sta member discov-
ered a crew of workers, sent by U.S.
Customs and Border Protection, on
the center's property, clearing brush
and chopping down trees, in prepara-
tion for the wall, which would strand
two-thirds of the center's land on the
"Mexican" side of the wall. The but-
terfly center has sued the federal gov-
ernment. "We understand that not ev-
eryone in the country may be as
interested in butterflies or in the en-
vironment as we are," the head of the
center told The Texas Observer. "But
everyone should care when the gov-
ernment thinks it can do whatever it
wants on your private property."
This is one of the reasons that the
Trump Administration has been eying
federal lands. Thanks to a Patriot
Act provision---the I.D. waiver---
federal agencies were able, under the
guise of national security, to ignore en-
vironmental and historic-preservation
laws in building hundreds of miles of
border fencing during the Bush Ad-
ministration. Earlier this year, a law-
suit challenging the waiver, filed by en-
vironmental groups and the State of
California, came before a federal judge
in San Diego, Gonzalo Curiel. Curiel,
you'll recall, was the judge in the Trump
University case whom Trump, during
his campaign, had called "a hater of
Donald Trump" who "happens to be,
we believe, Mexican." This time, Cu-
riel sided with Trump.
Yet, last month, Congress, in its
. -trillion omnibus spending bill, es-
sentially blocked the building of a wall
through the Santa Ana refuge---for
••